Heather Fowler-Salamini; The Logic of Compromise in Mexico: How the Countryside Was Key to the Emergence of Authoritarianism. Hispanic American Historical Review 1 November 2017; 97 (4): 750–752. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-4214513

The Logic of Compromise in Mexico is an unusually innovative reassessment of post-1930 peasant struggle for social and economic justice and its relationship to an increasingly violent and institutionalized form of authoritarianism. Gladys McCormick contends that a bipolar perspective, which juxtaposes rural resistance with state repression, needs to be modified to reflect a more nuanced and multifaceted approach to constantly oscillating strategies of rural groups and governing regimes from the late 1930s to the early 1960s. Adopting a modified revisionist approach, she argues that the gradual emergence of a more repressive form of state-sponsored authoritarianism was a constitutive part of agricultural modernization. She draws on revisionist skepticism of the idea that rural people were continually unable to negotiate successfully with the federal regime to obtain land, work, and self-rule without paying heavy costs as well as theoretical advances and methodological innovations of...